For the great central and solid fact, which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably to veil and confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishman of the middle class.

He may have had alien blood, and that alien blood, by the paradox we have observed, may have made him more characteristically a native.

A phase, a fancy, a metaphor may or may not have been born of eastern or southern elements, but he was, without any question at all, an Englishman of the middle class.
Neither all his liberality nor all his learning ever made him anything but an Englishman of the middle class.

He expanded his intellectual tolerance until it included the anarchism of _Fifine at the Fair_ and the blasphemous theology of Caliban; but he remained himself an Englishman of the middle class.

He pictured all the passions of the earth since the Fall, from the devouring amorousness of _Time's Revenges_ to the despotic fantasy of _Instans Tyrannus_; but he remained himself an Englishman of the middle class.